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Coordinates of the Rich and Famous

WHEN I agreed to represent Gawker, the Web site I co-edit, on an episode of “Larry King Live” last month, I didn’t expect to be shouted at, cut off, talked down to and told that I was going to hell. But as everyone who caught the show — or has seen it since on YouTube — knows, that’s exactly what happened, courtesy of Mr. King’s fill-in, Jimmy Kimmel. If you saw the clip, you probably noticed that I looked sort of stunned. I even rolled my eyes a few times. Here’s why.

Mr. Kimmel’s real target was the Gawker Stalker Map, a regular feature that displays brief, user-generated celebrity sightings on a map of Manhattan. He especially took issue with an entry last summer, when a tipster had reported that Mr. Kimmel was “visibly drunk and talking loud.”

It’s hard to believe that Mr. Kimmel, a late-night talk show host who has made on-air inebriation a cornerstone of his public image, was truly upset that people knew he’d gone out drinking. So what was he really angry about?

More likely, Mr. Kimmel was trying to defend the symbiotic relationship that has existed between celebrities and the mainstream entertainment media since the dawn of Hollywood, and which the Internet is steadily eroding.

Mr. Kimmel pointed out that we “post things that simply aren’t true,” and he’s right: some sightings do turn out to be false. But his real problem may be that most of our sightings are the truest to be found anywhere.

The stalker map sightings aren’t verified or vetted by publicists, and we won’t publish sightings that seem to come from publicists, though we receive many. Our posts are written by ordinary people with no obligation to tone down their insults in order to maintain access to a celebrity, as gossip reporters must — a recent sighting describes Hilary Swank as resembling “JonBenet Ramsey, but prettier and not dead,” a characterization that would probably never find its way into Us Weekly.

Is there anyone who reads the Page Six column in The New York Post or Star magazine credulous enough to believe that starlets are really “spotted” enjoying, say, a specific brand of vodka? Those glamorous sightings, flattering both celebrity and product, are the antithesis of Gawker Stalker, which often captures stars in quotidian, boring moments. Our sightings anger the rich and famous because it’s impossible for them to control their coverage by an unlimited number of anonymous writers the way they can with the smallish cadre of reporters in the mainstream news media.

Another canard that Mr. Kimmel dug up was the supposed threat to celebrities’ safety posed by the stalker map. Since the sightings aren’t posted in anything like real time, it would be a ludicrously ineffective tool for “real” stalkers.

When I mentioned this, Mr. Kimmel changed his tack, deploring the invasion of celebrities’ privacy. But why do celebrities find this “invasion” so much more reprehensible than the “invasion” represented by the carefully posed pictures and meticulously constructed narratives that we see in celebrity weeklies and newspaper society pages?

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a celebrity who wants to show off a new hair color, is trying to land a coveted role or needs to drum up interest in a new movie or TV show. You, or more likely your publicist, call up some favorite photographers and tell them in advance where you’ll be clubbing that night. You work hard to make sure that people are going to see you exactly the way you’d like them to — and whether that’s panty-less or picture-perfect depends on what you’re selling.

But the Internet, instead of relying on the expertise of an incestuous network of reporters and managers and publicists and photographers, gets its information from an army of anonymous strangers. And no matter how long and hard celebrities work to get the well-timed, utterly staged attention that’s going to be most profitable for them, the Internet can circumvent those efforts in a heartbeat. Celebrities like Mr. Kimmel who pretend that this new generation of gossip is hurting their feelings are covering up their real concern — that it’s hurting their bottom lines.

The effects of Internet-based, user-generated gossip aren’t limited to the stars themselves, of course. Publicists’ jobs are made more difficult when clients blame them for not being able to manipulate coverage by controlling access. And celebrity lawyers find themselves confused, to say the least, by the flexible, ephemeral nature of blogs: if a cease-and-desist order arrives, the remedy’s usually as quick and simple as taking the offending post down. Also threatened — though less so — are the paparazzi. True, their services are more in demand than ever. But the near-instantaneous diffusion across the Internet of celebrity images damages their ability to charge magazines and newspapers insane prices for their photographs.

Certainly, the stalker sightings invade celebrities’ privacy. Because of the Internet, they can no longer demand attention only when they’ve got something to promote, and are subject instead to constant scrutiny. But these stars deserve only as much sympathy as the people who get fired because their employers discover a “my boss is awful” blog posting. There’s just more information available to more people, about more people, than ever these days.

Supermarket tabloids and gossip columns still sell the illusion that stars live in a different world from the rest of us; but the Internet has created a new reality, and we’re all living in it together.

Emily Gould is the co-editor of the Web site Gawker.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on , on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Coordinates of the Rich and Famous. Today's Paper|Subscribe